Darke

by Rick Gekoski Canongate 320pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99

“There is nothing in literature so satisfying as a really good misanthrope,” said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times. When we first meet James Darke, narrator of Rick Gekoski’s debut novel, he is “closing himself up” in his London house. The “phone is to be disconnected, the doorbell doctored”; closeted with his books, he will take only occasional glances out of the window, to remind himself how much he “hates everything”. Gekoski, who is 72 and a well-known book dealer, does septuagenarian grumpiness to perfection, but this is also a story with wisdom and depth. He has proved it is “never too late to start a glittering career in fiction”.

Reading this mostly depressing novel, you begin to wonder if there is the “faintest sliver of emotional solace” here, said Alfred Hickling in The Guardian. Oddly enough, it comes with James making a trip to see “Sheffield United playing away to Brentford” with his grandson. The scenes of the pair “discussing the offside rule”, and Roald Dahl’s books, infuse the novel’s latter stages with unexpected warmth. “It comes almost too late, but is worth persevering for.”